Our education systems seem so dysfunctional it is tempting to imagine how you might build them from scratch. Like that's going to happen! Still, we can still imagine how we could radically improve it.

Friday, August 7, 2015

Research, teaching and basing our opinions on evidence

Over the last few years I have been reading of research claiming that research activity does not improve teaching skills and that the two may even be negatively correlated. Perhaps my willingness to accept this was influenced by my own personal experiences (strangely, I even witnessed PhDs in education who could not present well). I, perhaps naively, assumed that senior management in higher education had access to the same information sources as me and would be aware of this (and that a few in my own institution were exceptions due to the fact that we were a small provincial institution).

However, recently, in a blog by Greg Foley, I became aware that this important finding is not widely known, as he described how a university president made several inaccurate comments on the value of research to teaching. (On contacting Greg separately he provided me with some helpful references by Richard Felder here and here). More recently, at a consultative meeting of the great and the good of higher education in Ireland (Yes, I know, “what was I doing there?”), my suggestion that research be separated from teaching in higher education based on such research was met with some horror and disbelief.

So this brings me to this question - How is it that when taking part in discussions on and making decisions about issues that are not in our own domains, we in academia place so little importance on evidence. Indeed, like the consultative group mentioned above, I have been at many internal academic meetings where there have been quite lively debates (bitter arguments?) based on a set of conflicting opinions and with very little evidence being presented.

Could it be that where the evidence runs counter to our own personal interest we deliberately choose to ignore evidence. Perhaps, if arguing about something that is outside our own domains, we are unaware of the research and are too lazy to check it out. My suspicion is that it is the first of these two, as when I have referred to the above research in such debates, it is generally met with scepticism and then ignored.